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Posts tagged "viral"

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Sorry, Morgan Freeman is not narrating that viral TikTok video
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Morgan Freeman's celebrated baritone has been repurposed for projects the actor has not approved, and he is not happy about it. Freeman called out those unauthorized artificial intelligence-fueled voice clones in a post on X, thanking supporters for alerting him and his management about where AI-replicated versions of his voice have appeared. 

“Thank you to my incredible fans for your vigilance and support in calling out the unauthorized use of an A.I. voice imitating me,” Freeman posted, adding hashtags such as “#scam,” “#imitation,” and “#IdentityProtection.”

Though Freeman doesn't cite it specifically, his post is likely a reference to a new video in a viral TikTok series where an ersatz version of his voice narrates the activities of his “niece,” TikTok user @justinescameraroll, known as Justine. 

@justinescameraroll

♬ water (instrumental) – no/vox & karaokey

Her “Day in the Life of a Nepo Niece” videos have collectively amassed over one million views from her 218,6,000 TikTok and 123,000 Instagram followers. She captioned her most recent post, which has the voice clone of Freeman narrating, with, “Uncle Mo has been booked and busy, but I finally got him to narrate my trip!” A post of the video shared on X then reached 16.4 million people and may have prompted Freeman's reaction based on the timing. 

Justine later confirmed in a follow-up video that her video did not feature Freeman's real voice, adding, “I was just having a little bit of fun.”

Famous Fakes

The iconic nature of Freeman's voice means there's a lot of interest in imitating it for everything from the social media videos mentioned to full film narrations. ElevenLabs made a voice specifically designed to imitate Freeman. For instance, though the documentary “The Power of Chi” lists Freeman as the narrator, and it's on IMDB that way, Freeman has never even mentioned it. Plus, his voice in the film sounds more than a little off, as you can hear in the link. He might just be phoning it in for a paycheck from the obscure documentary, or it might be AI.

Freeman is far from alone among celebrities concerned about how AI-created versions of their face or voice might be used without their permission. In May, actress Scarlett Johansson voiced her anger upon discovering an OpenAI chatbot that sounded disturbingly similar to her voice. Johansson, who played an AI assistant in the 2013 film Her, found the situation particularly unsettling. OpenAI responded by announcing plans to discontinue the use of the ChatGPT voice that resembled Johansson's, though without admitting any fault.

The same goes for videos, which use deepfakes of celebrities to try and trick people into thinking the famous person endorsed the scam. Tom Hanks has had to alert fans about a deepfake video of himself on social media. So has trusted British consumer advice guide Martin Lewis, who warned of a deepfake video attempting to trick people into sending money for a scam investment.

The rapid advancement of AI has outpaced regulatory measures, leading to situations where individuals' voices and likenesses can be replicated without consent. The concern over AI-generated imitations is not limited to actors. AI music creation startups Suno and Udio are facing a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and major music labels for copyright infringement.  

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Turns out the viral ‘Air Head’ Sora video wasn’t purely the work of AI we were led to believe
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A new interview with the director behind the viral Sora clip Air Head has revealed that AI played a smaller part in its production than was originally claimed. 

Revealed by Patrick Cederberg (who did the post-production for the viral video) in an interview with Fxguide, it has now been confirmed that OpenAI's text-to-video program was far from the only force involved in its production. The 1-minute and 21-second clip was made with a combination of traditional filmmaking techniques and post-production editing to achieve the look of the final picture.

Air Head was made by ShyKids and tells the short story of a man with a literal balloon for a head. While there's human voiceover utilized, from the way OpenAI was pushing the clip on social channels such as YouTube, it certainly left the impression that the visuals were was purely powered by AI, but that's not entirely true. 

As revealed in the behind-the-scenes clip, a ton of work was done by ShyKids who took the raw output from Sora and helped to clean it up into the finished product. This included manually rotoscoping the backgrounds, removing the faces that would occasionally appear on the balloons, and color correcting. 

Then there's the fact that Sora takes a ton of time to actually get things right. Cederberg explains that there were “hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds a piece” which were then tightly edited in what the team described as a “300:1” ratio of what was generated versus what was primed for further touch-ups. 

Such manual work also included editing out the head which would appear and reappear, and even changing the color of the balloon itself which would appear red instead of yellow. While Sora was used to generate the initial imagery with good results, there was clearly a lot more happening behind the scenes to make the finished product look as good as it does, so we're still a long way out from instantly-generated movie-quality productions. 

Sora remains tightly under wraps save for a handful of carefully curated projects that have been allowed to surface, with Air Head among the most popular. The clip has over 120,000 views at the time of writing, with OpenAI touting as “experimentation” with the program, downplaying the obvious work that went into the final product. 

Sora is impressive but we're not convinced

While OpenAI has done a decent job of showcasing what its text-to-video service can do through the large language model, the lack of transparency is worrying. 

Air Head is an impressive clip by a talented team, but it was subject to a ton of editing to get the final product to where it is in the short. 

It's not quite the one-click-and you-'re-done approach that many of the tech's boosters have represented it as. It turns out that it is merely a tool which could be used to enhance imagery instead of create from scratch, which is something that is already common enough in video production, making Sora seem less revolutionary than it first appeared.

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